Lucidarium

Steve,could you share with us the meaning of some of your albums' titles . 9I have seen you post clues about your general philosophy but never about the choice of titles . The only exception to that would be the recent utube video where you give some clue as to where the idea of "Illusion of Body" comes from.)For example:-- Lucidarium-- On the rising of the 64 paths

mbase

Number of posts : 20Registration date : 2006-09-28

Subject: Song Title Meanings? Thu 18 Nov 2010 - 15:38

The title Lucidarium comes from the book Lucidarium, written around 1317 or 1318.

The Lucidarium of Marchetto of Padua: A Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary - translation, and commentary by Jan W. Herlinger

See:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetto_da_Padova

However the tuning that I used on that recording was 60-tone Equal Temperament, which was inspired by Marchetto and also inspired by the Egyptians and Babylonians.

It was also influenced by another composer named Nicola Vicentino, who in 1555 wrote a text more than 200 years later than Marchetto. Vicentino work is called L'antica Musica Ridotta alla Moderna Prattica (Ancient Music Adapted to Modern Practice).

See:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Vicentino

Both of these cats were into some microtonal stuff, dividing the tone into various divisions. But what I did in Lucidarium had some esoteric connotations also.

---

On the Rising of the 64 Paths comes from the musical methods that we are using on the recording, certain tonal paths or tonal directions (there are of course 64 of them) that are being used to move from one location to another. I think of them as doors or gateways to other places. These paths are symbolic of different directions that we can take in life.

---

There was a similar concept to these 64 Paths that I used around the time we recorded The Sonic Language of Myth and The Ascension to Light, as well as the Rameses 2000 computer music project done at IRCAM. That conception was inspired by the ancient Egyptian concept of the 36 Decans:

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decans

although I completely disagree with the assumptions made in this article - for example, I believe that the Egyptian Decans were used for astrology, astronomy and many other things, long before the civilization of the Greeks. This Wiki article implies that the Greeks introduced astrology to the Egyptians, because there is a link to Hellenistic Astrology in this article. Since the discovery of the Naos of the Decades, this implication has been proven to be false, unless you just want to believe it. At any rate, the ancient Greeks themselves wrote what their influences were, and they said that they got their information from the Egyptians. The Naos was dedicated to the Pharaoh Nectanebo I, who reigned from 380 to 362 B.C., which was before Alexander the Great invaded Egypt. Therefore it was before the construction of the Library of Alexandria (as that city did not exist as such at that time). And clearly the astrology that is represented by the Naos did not just pop up overnight, but was part of a long tradition from previous times. So the Egyptians could not have obtained their information from the Greeks, it was the other way around, just as the ancient Greeks wrote.

http://horoscopicastrologyblog.com/2007/05/11/egyptian-astrology-and-the-naos-of-the-decades/ (I wrote a rebuttal to his article at the bottom of this page)

More is at:http://www.archaeology.org/online/news/negypt.html

This all may seem off topic, but astronomy, astrology and music were all related in ancient times. So its instructive to study the history of both. John Coltrane realized this long ago, and in fact it is because of Coltrane that I began looking at these things in the first place.

Here is an except from a pdf that I downloaded:-----“Among the most spectacular exhibits is the so-called ‘Naos of the Decades’ engraved with the earliest known astrological calendar. A fragment of this unique shrine was discovered in the Bay of Aboukir in the 18th century. It was taken to Paris, where it became part of the Louvre’s permanent collection. The exhibition in Bonn brings together all known fragments of the ‘Naos of the Decades’, reuniting the Paris fragment with a loan from the Graeco-Roman Museum of Alexandria and the sections recently discovered by Franck Goddio.

The ‘Naos of the Decades’ Of particular importance is the discovery of the ‘Naos of the Decades’, a black granite shrine engraved with the earliest known astrological calendar. It was smashed and scattered by Christian zealots in the Byzantine era as a work of pagan idolatry and superstition. One of the fragments – the pyramid-shaped roof – was discovered as early as 1777 during excavations on land and has been in the Louvre in Paris since 1817. In 1940, divers working for Prince Omar Toussoun discovered further sizable chunks — the naos’ back and the base. But it wasn’t until Franck Goddio’s underwater excavations, which uncovered several more fragments, that archaeologists finally managed to reassemble the tabernacle. Consecrated in the 4th century BC by Pharaoh Nectanebo I, the black granite shrine was dedicated to the Egyptian god Shu who was worshipped as the personification of the air between sky and earth, as creator of the universe and lord of the stars. The shrine housed a representation of Shu in the shape of a seated lion made of silver covered with pure gold. The naos was engraved with the course of a number of celestial bodies across the night sky and with descriptions of their astrological impact on human and animal life. The hieroglyphic text documents the origin of the ancient Egyptian calendar with its 36 ten-day periods, or decades. Every decade is associated with a prophecy. According to the inscriptions the wandering of the stars brings unspeakable disaster, disease, plague and death upon Egypt’s enemies. Sacrificial offerings to the god Shu protected Egypt from her enemies. Unlike modern astrology, which is concerned with the fate of the individual, the ‘Naos of the Decades’ provided the pharaoh – mediator between the gods and man – with a powerful instrument of divine providence that allowed him to protect the Egyptian people as a whole, to create wealth and ward off the country’s enemies. The ‘Naos of the Decades’ bears witness to the history of ideas because it documents how astrology and mythology developed out of the scientific observation of astronomical phenomena, and not the other way round.”-----